18.1.07

There is a book I should be writing. It's languishing on my desktop behind this window. I am procrastinating. At this very moment I should be finding a way to get from one sentence to another, advancing my plot. Instead I do this. This work is unimportant, thus much easier and much more fun. There's a kind of adolescent pleasure in avoiding that which must be done.

I have always hated to do the necessary work. I have always put it off to the last possible moment - if I did it at all. In sixth grade I started putting off doing my homework. I would lie to my mother and say I was doing my homework while I read in my bedroom. Just before bed I would do one assignment - the one due first thing in the morning. Then I would systematically and surreptitiously do each assignment during the class immediately preceeding the time it was due.

By high school, I had given up homework. I had almost given up school entirely. I studied only the night before a test and then only very late at night. Then I mostly gave up studying. I never had any kind of educational discipline. This has carried over to my adult life. I don't want to do it. Not that I don't want to write the book, I just really wish there was some way that I could extract it from my head in some way other than typing one word after another.

17.1.07

Pretend if you will that these words are a conversation. Three people at a table, two talking back and forth for a few minutes. Things are all normal and then, from nowhere, "That's like plyboo," is interjected from the third member of the party. This is what the Romans called a non sequitur. We still call it that. It still means "it does not follow." I state now, in unequivocal terms, plyboo had nothing to do with the previous sentences spoken by any of us in the preceeding 17 years of acquaintence. I have never had a conversation wherein "That's like plyboo," would ever have followed. In general, I don't discuss wood. I particularly don't discuss plywood made from bamboo.

When queried as to the relavence of her remark, the offending party (and I was offended) replied that, in fact, it had nothing to do with what we had been discussing. Since this event, I have ben trying to figure out why a woman in her third decade of life would behave thus.

Was it a desperate attempt to redirect the conversation? And if so, is plyboo the way to go about it? Had her mind wandered? Had she spoken something out loud she hadn't meant to? Was it the product of an illicit substance? I don't know. Is it so much to ask that remarks be cogent? Is it really so much to ask?